The solution to prevent those problems is very easy: Give Helpers perms to ban rule breakers. Since they are a lot in the Discord server to help people in Staff-Help they can react faster in case of problems.
Helpers are perfectly able to kick people, and I believe they might be able to ban people as well, the issue is the policy that forces helpers to tell their mentor before they are allowed to do absolutely anything. This is an issue with the helper procedure itself as if they want these people to be able to punish people when other mods can't how are they supposed to do this as they just have to report it which requires a mod to be online and kind ruins the whole thing as the helpers are kinda just sitting there, unable to do anything and receiving criticism because of the system, however this issue will fix itself in the long term.
Moderation on the Discord has always been something that has concerned me. While the staff team is great, and honestly is one of the best I've ever met in terms of punishment and response, they've still got so far to improve before I'd consided it good.
Now, Cube have made some huge improvements, a couple of years ago it was complete anarchy to even the point where raids by large groups of people who were engaging in extreme targeted harassment were responded to slowly and barely punished if at all. These days it's a lot of the smaller things that have become a lot more apparent. The extreme leniency and inconsistently with warnings - some people could be banned for swearing twice whereas some people have been warned in the double digits of times and haven't even been kicked. There needs to be much mroe consistency with punishments - some kind of specific punishment tracks for Discord as well as A DISCORD BOT as with a bot you can do more than just kick and ban (Management refuses to just add a pre made bot like Dyno or Mee6 while also refusing to work on their own Discord bot). This issue really just boils down to Management and their lack of focus on Discord as they are the people who are in charge of this. The mods aren't the one who decide the policy they operate by, they need the admins to invite the bot and deal with it.
To summarise, the Discord just needs a huge refresh and this issue is one of the biggest issues that need to be addressed. These things need to happen before the moderation can be called good imo:
- Faster response times - I know a more active Discord server with less than half the online staff members compared to Cube who still manage to deal with issues in less than half the time as Cube. Leaving an incredibly toxic troll who is causing huge amounts of harm for 20-40 minutes before banning them is not adequate.
- Discord specific punishments - Like I said before, there needs to be specific Discord punishment tracks so that some people don't get loads of warnings and some people don't get 0 because the rules don't actually give anything about it
- Better Discord punishment tracking - Relating to ensuring that punishments are consistent, there needs to be better tracking of the punishments as there clearly isn't good enough tracking currently as there have been countless times that previously punished people get away breaking rules again because the staff who punished them the 2nd time didnt do it the 1st time.
- A DISCORD BOT - JUST ADD ONE PLEASE, IT MAKES EVERYONE'S LIVES BETTER. Multiple more punishments, far better tracking and automated chat filter just to begin with, and it's so easy it takes like 10-20 minutes to set up.
- Harsher punishments - Giving people loads of warnings will not get people to stop. The number of times that people just get away with doing things over and over again because all they get is a light warning is ridiculous, although this mostly happens with trolls and similar rule breakers.
- Punishments specifically for "death by a thousand cuts" - we all know them, that person who constantly walks on the line over and over just to test the patience of staff, but gets away with it because they don't really break any rules, they just blur the line so much. These people need to be gone. They are toxic and they are trolls, yet they just get to stay.
- Better recognition of trolls - Trolls are similar to the death by a thousand cuts statement, they mostly just blur the line and are absolutely obviously just there to troll and upset other users. Ban them instantly, they don't deserve to be on the server if their intent is to just be unpleasant.
- Continue hiring staff - This is less of a suggestion, but more of an encouragement for the admin team to keep up the great work hiring more staff - considering how it can take up to an hour for a single mod out of a total of over 20 to just ban a single person saying extremely unpleasant things.
There's a lot of work to do, but it is possible given enough effort is put in from the Admin team, as a lot of this is down to them and how they decide how the staff team runs. However, considering how ridiculously little effort they appear to have towards the Discord server and improving it, I find it unlikely that they'll do a single one of these unfortnately. Thanks for bringing this up though, this is a topic which definitely needs to be talked about. Considering how poor the moderation is, I honestly think a long written out response to Discord could even get the server's partnered status removed considering how
the partner guidelines state that "We (Discord) do expect you to build a moderation team who will take action on issues within a reasonable timeframe. Having no moderation or claiming the server is too big to moderate is unacceptable."
